Jamie Johnson Quotes

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

Take pains to get on your side the young men of high rank, and keep the friendship of those whom you already have. They will contribute much to your political position.

There's an unspoken rule in affluent circles that suggests you can always define an individual's status by measuring his or her proximity to the most influential person in the room. And as the maxim goes, closer is always better.

My mother doesn't have much of a social life with other A-list people. Which in a way I'm very grateful for, because if I do make something of my career I will be able to say it wasn't because I was a Chaplin.

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

In the eighties, we had the ladies who lunch, the power lunch - everything was power. At the beginning of the nineties, things changed.

Humans have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to changes in status.

I don't understand all about New York society. It's only when they are in trouble that I'm really interested.

The slave has but one master, the ambitious man has as many as there are persons whose aid may contribute to the advancement of his fortunes.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

You [the President] invite Congressmen to the White House for dinner. And you know what is does? It puts them in great with their wives, because the wives love to be invited to the White House.

A young man, be his merit what it will, can never raise himself; but must, like the ivy round the oak, twine himself round some man of great power and interest.

Out in Hollywood, you get the feeling when people are talking to you, that they are looking right past you - like they're looking to see who else they can talk to.

There are people who are socially ambitious. If you go back aways, the Sculls, for instance, had a lot of money and they were socially ambitious. If you get an old master, it's not going to do you any good socially.

[William Jennings Bryan was] a poor clod, a peasant come home to the barnyard, motivated solely by the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes.

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

Hamilton had a certain social versatility, and in a way, that is understandable because he's someone who rises up from the lowest rungs of society and then scales the top. And he gets to know people from every strata along the way.

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

I'm not that interested in just being around powerful people for the sake of it.

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn't know how the world of the American elite works.

I started my career in Hollywood, where I learned the rumors were true - having success there really was dictated by how who you knew, not what you knew. I grew frustrated by the fact that careers could be made and broken by relationships alone.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

Notwithstanding the supposed egalitarian ethos of some hunter-gatherer societies, humans are a hierarchical social species. We care greatly about where we stand in comparison to some relevant reference group.